Tech

Hands On With the Nokia Lumia 925

Nokia Lumia 925

A Sleeker Lumia

Thanks to its aluminum exterior, the Lumia 925 is perhaps the most sophisticated looking of Nokia's current smartphones. It has a 4.5-inch OLED display and carries the company's PureView label, meaning the camera sports advanced imaging technology.

Covers

Back covers for the Lumia 925 come in different colors and incorporate wireless charging, which isn't built into the device itself.

Backside

Lumia 925's back side is mostly made out of polycarbonate.

Side View

Lumia 925 from the side.

Browser

Nokia Lumia 925 showing your favorite website.

LONDON — The Lumia 925 is another notch on the photographic bedpost of Nokia’s burgeoning cameraphone arsenal. The first in its flagship metal range, the company cites a "materials-based design approach," and it certainly feels sturdy and comfy in hand while being noticeably lighter and slimmer than its Lumia siblings.

The new design incorporates a slim matte-finish aluminium band running around its edge that divides the polycarbonate rear from the sculpted edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass screen. It not only looks good but acts as the 925’s antenna too. It’s a positive step away from the usual Lumia design and at only 0.33 inch thin and 4.9 ounces (that’s 1.6 ounces lighter than the Lumia 920) conspires to make the 925 a phone you’ll want to hold and stroke while making the older Lumias look almost clunky by comparison.

Internally it’s Lumia business as usual despite the 925’s lesser dimensions and weight. It runs the same dual-core 1.5GHz processor with 1GB of RAM and up to 16GB of non-expandable storage (although Nokia said Vodafone would be offering an exclusive deal for a 32GB version in the U.K., Germany, Spain and Italy).

Available in three "colours" — black, white and grey and various two-tone combinations thereof, the 925 has a serious but sophisticated look and feel that I like more than the hallmark primary colors of the existing Lumia line.

The Lumia 925 lacks the 920's integrated Qi wireless charging, but you can get it back — along with those bright colors — with an accessory. To wireless charge, you’ll need to buy a snap-on cover that acts and looks like any typical phone case and comes in the full gamut of Lumia colours — black, red, white and a particularly punchy yellow.

Screen Idol

Another change from the existing Lumia range but following on from the announcement of last week’s 928 is the new 4.5-inch OLED display delivering 1,280 x 768 pixels. It’s still peddling the ClearBlack technology that suitably blackens blacks and by contrast helps colours to pop, and in our test model the Windows Live Tiles were clear and sharply defined, though the underground bunker location didn’t give us a chance to test it in direct sunlight where OLED can suffer over IPS displays. A nice touch is the ability to incrementally tailor color saturation and vibrancy for the screen as a whole to set it just how you like it.

Smart Camera

Typical to the Lumia range, the 925’s fanfare parade is for its camera. Sporting the same 8.7-megapixel sensor from its previous models, Nokia promises us it’s made huge improvements to the camera lens and software algorithms that make it the "most advanced lens technology" available.

Importantly, the 925's camera has the PureView label, and its Carl Zeiss lens has a new addition — a new lens. The lens has six elements (one glass, five plastic) compared to the iPhone’s five, which Nokia claims has significantly improved its low-light credentials. Strangely there’s no xenon flash as added to last week’s 928, so we have to settle with the dual LED instead, but in the ‘photos in the dark’ test room it proved to be as adept as we’d hoped for and a better low-light performer than most smartphone cams.

It’s not just in the hardware the Nokia has made improvements to its camera. Smart Camera is a new app that hosts the camera’s myriad functionality, making it super easy and quick to shoot and edit your pics all from one place. Shooting 10 frames each time you click, you’re then presented with five editing modes including Best Shot, Action Shot, Motion Blur, Change Faces and Fade Effect.

I have to say, it’s startlingly easy to use and in less than a minute I was chopping and changing in all sorts of ways, from fading colors out to blurring backgrounds with two swipes and a tap of the screen. The Fade Effect is another particularly nice touch that lets you create some strange ghosting effects that could have kept me occupied for hours.

Granted, even with two errant skateboarders showing off, the launch event isn’t the best place to test this tech to the max, but I was left itching to have another go in "real world" conditions. Punchy and clear on the new OLED screen, the 925 may now have set the benchmark for smartphone camera photography and editing.

Best of the Rest

Internally, the 925 differs little from the 920 (and the 928 from what we’ve seen) and as such performance is almost identical, which is not a bad thing. Standard web browsing was fine with pages loading quickly and cleanly, while email took a little longer but that was mostly down to the pedestrian Wi-Fi I was using.

In truth, the real differentiators over the 920 and 928 are in design and the camera upgrades. Design- and looks-wise, the 925 has left the existing Lumias lagging way behind, boosted by the hefty weight loss and the inclusion of that subtle metal styling. Yes, the Smart Camera app is a real boon to budding snappers, but Nokia said it will be offered as a free firmware upgrade to the entire Lumia range over the course of the summer under the name "Amber update," which leaves the design element as the main draw.

The 925 undoubtedly sings quality from every aspect of its design and makes the very most of Windows Phone. But is it a big enough step forwards to tempt us away from iOS or Android, or to upgrade from the 920? I’m not so sure.

The Nokia Lumia 925 starts shipping in June 2013 with a retail price of €469 (about $600).

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